EDWARDSVILLE — Today, in an era when construction workers reflexively don hard hats as they enter a job site, it seems almost absurd that workers once disdained them as a sign of weakness.

But in construction project photos from the 1920s and ‘30s, few people can be seen wearing hard hats, and the attitude among many workers at the time seemed to be that wearing them was a sign of personal weakness.

“Images from this era show workers taking foolish risks like eating lunch or reclining on narrow steel beams, as if to show they were not afraid of the dangers of construction,” according to “Hard Hat – Origins and Evolution,” which appears in the July issue of Concrete International, the official magazine of the American Concrete Institute.

Its author is Luke Snell, a professor emeritus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Snell and his wife, Billie, recently returned to Edwardsville from a two-week stint in Mongolia where Luke spoke at a concrete conference seminar and together they started a new certification program on basic concrete testing.

During his research for the magazine article, Snell said that what struck him as most interesting was the attitude by most construction workers of that era that the hard hat was somehow a symbol of fear. “They seemed to take great pride in taking foolish risks,” Snell said in a brief phone interview. “Trying to sleep on a steel beam up there, or pretending to, and that type of stuff. It’s an entirely different sort of attitude toward safety than we have today.”

Snell points out that helmets have been used on the battlefield for more than 3,000 years and they are still used to protect soldiers today.

Even during the 1920s and ‘30s, at least some employers realized the need to protect their workers’ heads on the job site. The US Navy, for instance, encouraged workers to wear hard hats in the shipyard. “While some have speculated that these hats were more useful for shielding workers from waste dropped by seagulls,” Snell writes, “they were intended to protect workers from falling objects during the loading and unloading of ships.”

Those hats were first ordered by the US Navy in 1917. The Bullard Hard Boiled hat – manufactured by the E.D. Bullard Co. – was comprised of a steamed canvas crown, a leather brim, glue and black paint. Other protective headgear began showing up in the 1920s when telephone linemen “stuffed papers in their hats to soften the blow from objects from co-workers above them,” Snell writes.

Hard hats as we now think of them were probably first introduced in 1931 by the Electrical Union. They used surplus World War I helmets to provide protection against falling rivets during construction of a post office in Boston. “Because these rivets were hot, the electricians were protected from burns or singed hair as well as a blow from falling objects,” writes Snell.

A good bit of “Hard Hats – Origins and Evolution” deals with the role hard hats played in the construction of Hoover Dam. Before his retirement from SIUE in 2006, Snell taught construction management and was also chair of the ACI’s History Committee, where he was asked to put together a seminar on the construction of Hoover Dam. That research eventually led him to write the article for ACI, he said.

The initial protective hats were worn by workers who were suspended from cables and used jackhammers to remove rocks from the cliffs. These “high scalers” created their own head protection by taking a cloth hat, dipping it into tar and letting it harden in the sun.

“The homemade protective hats proved successful in protecting the workers from falling rocks. Even though some high scalers wearing the hats were hit so hard their jaws were broken, they did not suffer skull fractures,” Snell writes.

The first project where the wearing of hard hats was mandatory was during construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Chief Engineer Joseph Strauss wanted to improve safety and protect workers from falling rivets.

Snell notes that today’s helmets – often polyethylene shells with adjustable suspensions – are considered an essential part of the construction uniform for the modern construction worker.